ABSTRACT
Is there a consensus of opinion in the English Renaissance about how words meant? Or, to rephrase this question for our times, did Shakespeare's period have a theory of representation? Many such theories exist. To assert one is to make it true, in a limited way, but which one was commonly asserted in Early Modem England is a historical question, not a philosophical one. Charles C. Fries, in the lapsed Early Modem English Dictionary project at Ann Arbor, made room in his word entries for "the explicit thought of some of the people of the time concerning their own language" (Bailey 1980: 207-08), even though their linguistic opinions appear strange today. In her Art of Naming, Anne Ferry argues that 16th-century English ought to be treated "as we would the language of a foreign text" (1988: xiv). Judith Anderson adds that "The most basic structures of meaning understood by one age [i.e., the Renaissance] are not translated into those understood by another without the elision of substantial differences" (1996: 3). These anomalies pervade language, from spelling and grammatical parts of speech to the alphabet, 1 and especially the Early Modem English speaker's assumptions about word meaning. Until the 18th century, words were not defined. They signified things, which were alone definable in so-called logical definitions that specified genus or class and differentia or distinguishing features. In contrast, words could only be explained, or "interpreted," by means of equivalency with other words (including etymons and foreign-language terms) and of denotation. For this reason, the English Renaissance needed no standard English dictionary, and one did not appear until the mid-17th century. Society was literate despite being ill-informed about its own language.
